


The Trial of Michael Xavier

by iberiandoctor (jehane)



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo, X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Discussions of Canonical Suicide, Fix-It, Ghosts, Halloween, Identity Issues, M/M, Paris (City), Pining, Redemption, Timeline Mash-up, ToT: Chocolate Box, ToT: Monster Mash, Various historical cameos - Freeform, redemption arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 09:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8366890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehane/pseuds/iberiandoctor
Summary: They'll always have Paris.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Andraste](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andraste/gifts).



> Happy All Hallow's Eve! Hopefully you enjoy this pining, mostly-gen, comics-verse story, even though you may not have asked for this cross-over, exactly... I'm afraid I couldn't resist these two fandoms which both involved dubious identity issues and pining, and white-haired older gentlemen saving their mortal enemies from the Seine ;)
> 
> My thanks to cross-fandom team of Esteven, Miss M. and Underground: for the history and location consult, for the most excellent line beta, and for helping with the name-switching, the sex, and supplying the Parisian tag-line. You ladies are the best ♥

After he had been reluctantly crowned the Hellfire Club’s new White King, Professor Michael Xavier decided to take a trip back to Paris.

The mutant supremacist, who had been tried before the International Court of Justice in that very city, would have ridden the earth's magnetic currents to travel the globe from Westchester County to wherever he desired. The White King could have commandeered the Blackbird or one of the Hellfire Club’s discreet jets. 

But Michael Xavier, private citizen, did neither of those things. Leaving Ororo in charge of the school, he booked a business class ticket on Air France. 

On the flight, he drank champagne he had no taste for; he reclined his seat to mimic sleep that did not come; he rode the air currents in a commercial airliner with the _homo sapiens_ he was trying very hard to care about. When he arrived in Paris, he cleared immigration through ordinary channels.

He had found himself a terraced suite at the famous George V with views of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. Its canopied bed felt far too empty. He wore Michael Xavier's starched shirts and Lagerfeld suits in midnight-blue pinstripe like the imposter he was.

When the self-acclaimed master of magnetism had last rested his head beneath a French roof, it had been within a reinforced cell of the Conciergerie, the infamous Parisian prison that had housed kings and queens and self-styled emperors, from Marie Antoinette to Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. Decommissioned as a prison in 1914, the Conciergerie had opened its doors, exceptionally, to Magneto, remanding him in royal discomfort in the weeks leading up to his trial. 

He had not been able to sleep there, either. The ancient stones around him had echoed with the people's cries for blood, and he had imagined the world's similar outcry for his own. 

To complete the picture, instead of the three-piece suit his lawyers had urged, he'd chosen to wear the purple and porphyry of Roman emperors, the fearsome name he'd ascribed to himself branded across his breast. He was not going to hold himself before the world in a disguise. Let them see the mutant supremacist for who he was; let him attempt to convince them that, behind that terrifying helmet, he was a man like any other.

The court papers filed before the Special Tribunal of the International Court of Justice, citing crimes against humanity, had diligently listed his aliases, from Max Eichmann, Holocaust survivor, to the Sinte gypsy Erik Magnus Lensherr. But the principal alias of the defendant in the issued indictment was _Magneto_ , the name under which the pleaded crimes had been committed.

There was one person who had known him under all his names and aliases, who hadn't turned away from the criminal dressed in the uniform that had been the synonyms for terror across the world. Who had been at his side from the moment he had set foot on French soil.

Charles Xavier had insisted on accompanying him into custody as he'd surrendered himself to the International Court of Justice. Charles had signed up to Magneto's defence team, and spent hours with the defendant in the Conciergerie's uncomfortable underground cell, separated from the cold depths of the Seine by a thin layer of the Conciergerie’s primitive stone. When legal stratagems ran out, Charles had read to him from the International Herald Tribune, from European newspapers, and from the Blackstone and Blaise Pascal and the T.H. White that they'd read together years ago. After dinner, they had played the chess that they had always played every time they'd encountered each other, regardless of the alias Magneto had been going by at the time.

More than a year later, Michael sat alone in the lavish hotel suite that Magneto would have sniffed at and Max could not have afforded, and felt Charles' absence as the loss of a limb.

The tree-lined streets of Paris were beginning to show the colours of autumn, red and golden as louis d'or. The air was cooler than it had been in the summer of his trial, when temperatures both inside the courtroom and outside it had run high, and both pro- and anti-mutant sentiment had threatened to overwhelm a city already habituated to rebellious uprising. 

Now, Michael walked through its colder, emptier streets: haunted by Charles, by his students, by the memories of those weeks of trial and revolution. 

As his days in Paris lengthened to a week, and then two, he found himself drawn again and again to the historic Île de la Cité. He walked its boulevards; he prowled its gardens and markets; he bent his head before the stained glass and celebrated archways of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame and contemplated the difficult issue of mercy, all the while imagining Charles and his X-men at his side.

Charles had believed in mercy. He had believed in many beautiful, idealistic, unrealistic things — a world where humans and mutants could live side by side in peace, the lambs lying down with the lions and being protected by them. Magneto had shared that dream, once, before he had turned to this far more violent path, and ever since then Charles had spent his later years trying to convince him to embrace it again — that that dream could be achieved without violence, and that there could be mercy and redemption for even irascible mutant super-villains who swore they could not change.

It had begun in Cuba, of course, when they had been young men together in the full flush of their youth and reckless love. Charles had watched helplessly as the man he'd known as Erik Lensherr had taken his revenge on the Black King and don the helmet and mantle of Magneto. 

_There will be no turning back,_ Charles had said. _You said yourself, we're the better men; this is the time to prove it,_ Charles had begged, and it had all been in vain.

 _I've been at the mercy of men just following orders,_ he'd said, Magneto had said, his clothes stained with the blood of the man that had killed his family, their future in ruins at his feet.

When Charles had been shot, Erik had tried to use the accident to win Charles over to _his_ dream. _I tried to warn you, Charles. I want you by my side. Protecting each other. We want the same thing._

 _My friend, I'm sorry_ — and Charles was; his back was shattered and still he was sorry for Erik — _We do not._

Like all kinds of blind idiot, Erik had walked away, had left everything good in his life behind on that beach.

And still, over the years, Charles had not given up on him. He had led the opposition from the wheelchair Erik had placed him in, but he never failed to reach out in the name of their past friendship and past love, to try to win his enemy back to his dream. When Erik — when Magneto — had needed him, in Paris, he had been there.

In Michael Xavier’s constant perambulations of the Cité, he kept circling back to the Palais de Justice. Its austere facade seemed to rise above all other buildings, looming like a spectre over him that mocked his continued freedom. The charges against him, against Magneto, had been spent, his trial adjourned indefinitely before the International Court of Justice, but the moral sentence remained, an invisible noose around his neck.

He remembered what he had said when he addressed the Court, Charles at his side.

 _My dream, from the start, has been the preservation of my own kind, to spare them the same fate my family suffered in Auschwitz. You humans slaughtered each other because of the colour of your skin, your faith, your politics, or for no reason at all; too many of you hate as easily as you draw breath. I thought I could impose sanity from above, by conquest, but there are too many of you. So I thought I would try another way…_ I _am the reason why mutants are unjustly feared. That is why I am here, why I will abide by the Court’s decision. My hope is to make the world understand the reason for my being. But most of all, to punish_ me _for my crimes, and no longer my people._

And he had believed it too, had been prepared to make reparation through his imprisonment, until Charles had persuaded him he could redeem himself in this other way.

He’d said, also: _Whatever my own fate, you must confront the reality posed by my people. We, homo sapiens superior, are your children, we are the next generation of humanity. What kind of parent fears his progeny and tries to murder them? Is this the legacy you wish to leave? I have seen the error of my ways — can you say the same?_

His words had been unintentionally ironic. While the trial had been progressing in the Palais, Paris had come under attack by terrorists who had called themselves _Fenris_ , after the legendary wolf that sought to dominate the world. The terrorists had been young Bavarian mutants seeking revenge on behalf of their father, the agent of HYDRA whom Charles and he had faced down as young men in Haifa decades ago. 

This had been the legacy that Baron von Strucker had left behind, a fitting legacy for a HYDRA commandant: children sworn to violence against civilians, pledged to create chaos out of order. Charles’ students — Charles’ own legacy — had risen up to meet Fenris, defending humans who hated and feared them, as they always did and always would.

It had been Fenris who had set him, Magneto, on his final path. Magneto had joined the X-men to defeat Fenris, to defend Paris — in full view of the Special Tribunal, which he learned had later declared the mistrial after having witnessed their defendant's surprisingly noble conduct. 

When the twins had broken a hole through the cellars of the Palais to escape, and Charles had been taken by the river, Magneto — Erik — had finally said _yes_. Yes to Charles’ dream, yes to carrying on in Charles’ place, to taking over the school, and taking on the alias of Charles' cousin, Michael Xavier. 

For the umpteenth time, he wished he had not acquiesced. The responsibility was so immense it frightened a man who had lived through Auschwitz. More nights than not, he found this road to redemption so difficult that he was almost ready to ask the International Court of Justice to convene another tribunal and draw up a fresh indictment. 

As the sun set, he finally summoned the courage to stand once again on the steps of the Palais. Red light fell against the sombre columns, making them look as if they were covered in blood. 

Michael noticed remnants of the trial graffiti — _Libérer les Mutants!_ and _Magneto: Assassin!_ — had not yet been entirely scrubbed from the façade. The X-men had tried their best to clean up the city after the battles with Fenris, but some things could not be erased.

 

***

 

As night fell around him on the Île de la Cité, he found himself haunted by spirits of an entirely different nature. 

He'd forgotten what night it was: the night when October shaded into November and the walls between worlds grew thin enough to breach.

Spirits were Charles' department, of course, but when he’d been Erik Lensherr he had walked enough of the astral plane at Charles' side to be able to discern the life forces of the unliving, and All Hallow's Eve was the one night of the year where spirits were free to roam the earth.

Paris was not a city devoid of spirits. Its bloody past and history of uprisings had engendered streets filled with the famous and the forgotten alike. Silver-lined ghosts walked side by side with the living: dead French writers and scientists and musicians in 19th and 20th century garb mingled with faceless men and women in rags and indistinct figures in older-style royal finery, blood on their clothes and the occasional head tucked under an elegant arm. 

Michael Xavier would not have recognised Robespierre if he had seen him in either life or his guillotined, jaw-shattered death, but he recognised the ghost striding rapidly along the Boulevard du Palais from the sculptured terracotta likeness of the revolutionary that he’d once seen at the Château de Vizille. 

Indeed, the tricolour flag of the Republic was being worn in force by many of the revolutionaries amongst the Parisian spirits; Michael noted it about the waist of a tall, striking youth with golden curls around his shoulders. He was carrying a 19th century musket and a red flag, and briskly led a group of young men all outlined in silver toward the Pont Notre-Dame.

Michael was grateful for small mercies: at least he was not haunted by his own dead, by Magda and Anya, by the mob in Vinnytsia and the crew of the _Leningrad_ which he had sunk with all hands so many years ago. 

Accompanied by the spectres of Paris, Michael continued his walk along the banks of the river. His steps took him over the Pont au Change, which ghostly carriages traversed alongside modern Peugeots and Mercedes-Benzes. He paused on the bridge to observe the stars reflected in the turbulent surface of the Seine. 

He remembered how cold the river had been when he'd dived in after Charles, how he had let the Seine take them both, the currents dragging them down, filling him with an ancient, remembered fear of drowning which he'd had to fight away in order to save his friend. He remembered how, when they'd been much younger and even more hot-headed, he had gone into the Atlantic after the Black King's submarine on a fool's quest; how he'd then exceeded his strength, how Charles had gone into the water without hesitation to save the life of a complete stranger. 

Then, he'd come back to himself in Charles' arms in the water; dazed and soaked to the skin and shivering, he'd been astounded to meet this astonishing man. 

“I thought I was alone,” he had said — and Charles, ever the romantic, had informed him, “You’re not alone,” and had called him Erik. 

He remembered the different scene, decades later in a Parisian garden, with Charles coming back to himself, soaked to the skin and dying, in the infinitely weaker arms of Magneto.

Their surfacing that year had done violence to those gardens — to the Jardin de l'Infante, downstream from the Conciergerie, beside the famous Louvre. His feet led him now in that direction, over the Pont au Change to the Quai des Gesvres on the Right Bank.

The gardens were shut. However, their golden gates posed no obstacle to the master of magnetism: he waved them open, then shut them behind him.

Summer’s green still clung to the gardens. The hole that Magneto had blasted out of the ground was neatly filled, the grass untrammelled once more. The vista was entirely serene, as if Xavier and his X-men had not happened to it that turbulent night.

Michael Xavier walked to the place where Charles had lain dying. He went to his knees now, as he had then, holding his friend in his arms for the first time in years, the night falling around them.

“You’re not going to die,” he’d told the man he’d loved and hated in equal measure. “I won’t allow you to give up.”

Charles had coughed. “Don’t be absurd, it’s out of our hands. Promise me, Erik, that you’ll carry on in my place. Take over my school. Look after my X-men.”

“Impossible, they’ll never accept me.”

“Are you… afraid?”

He’d never been more terrified. “Charles, I’m not worthy of your trust. Do not ask what I cannot give.”

Charles had said, fiercely, “Prove yourself worthy! Remember when we were young, the dreams we shared? After that we walked different paths. You say now yours was wrong. You seek to make amends — here's your chance, to do what no one believes can be done. It will stand as a far nobler monument and better safeguard our people than your martyrdom at this trial.”

This was, of course, the same argument that Charles had made over the years: in the heat of battle, in the aftermath of love. But the message finally struck home, now that Magneto had learned there needed to be another way, now that Charles was dying, now that Erik realised it might soon be too late.

“It will be hard.” Erik had not then known just how true that would be.

Charles had been implacable, as unyielding as if he were not in fact close to death. “Consider the alternative.”

And Erik had said, “I will try.”

Charles had coughed, had grasped hold of the front of the ridiculous uniform, making a fist in the symbol on his chest, and tried to reach up, and Erik had kissed his old friend and old enemy and felt the years fall away. 

It had not been in equal measure. Not even close; maybe it had been love all along.

When the Shi’ar arrived to interrupt their reunion, Erik experienced a sharp moment of bitterness before the overwhelming relief. Trust his irresistible Charles to have made a conquest of the exiled Empress-Majestrix Lilandra, who had somehow ridden into town on a borrowed starship, to spirit her consort back to the Shi’ar Imperial homeworld and save the day. 

However, Charles wasn’t about to let his old lover off the hook, now that he’d finally seduced Erik back to his dream once more.

From his new Empress-consort’s arms, he had told Erik, sternly, “You don't get off so easily. If I can’t get back from Shi'ar, or something goes wrong... We can't take that risk. The school needs a headmaster.”

Erik had said, “You think you know me better than I know myself? Suppose I fail you and betray your dream?”

Charles had never compromised, had never backed down; it was the one thing Erik loved and hated about him. “ _Our_ dream, blast you! And we'll never know ... if you don't ... try!”

With that parting blow, he had left Erik alone in the garden, his body still warm from Charles’ weight and the press of Charles’ lips. On Erik’s own lips had been the promise he had made to his friend: that he would try.

And he had indeed tried. He had assumed the role of Michael Xavier, and had done his best to guide and mentor the students, and had fought alongside the X-men. But, as he had feared, the children had found it impossible to trust him, and he could not entirely blame them. Then had come the trials from the One Beyond, and the massacre of the Morlocks, and without Charles he was simply not equal to those challenges, to the responsibility of upholding their dream.

Suddenly the beautiful gardens were oppressive, mocking him with their emptiness and with his failure. Erik rose, opened the golden gates, and headed away from the last place he had seen Charles Xavier. 

He crossed the street, blindly, striding rapidly over the damp concrete, evading the silver-lined ghost of a dark-haired young woman in trousers and a red hat peering somberly from the steps of the Place du Châtelet. He did not immediately realise that his steps had led him to the edge of the Quai de Gesvres, to the old border of the river Seine. 

Magnetic currents lifted him onto the broad parapet so he could overlook more than the highway and stare into the abyss of water beyond.

Without Charles at his side, he could not remember what it was like to be fearless, to dream of a better tomorrow. Without Charles, the future seemed as dark as the roiling depths of the Seine.

 

 

" _…Don't do anything I wouldn't do, Monsieur_ ," said an acerbic voice at his side. 

A male voice, speaking French with an accent that seemed to hail from the past century.

Professor Michael Xavier looked across the parapet at a wavering figure in the moonlight that had not been there a moment ago. 

The man was tall, as tall as Michael himself, and almost as broad. His face was hidden under the brim of his hat, his chin beneath the folds of the old-fashioned triple collar of an ancient great-coat. He had a cudgel at his side, and a long cane that the French _sergeants de ville_ had carried in the 1800s. He would have cut a fearsome figure in any century, and was especially so now, limned against the night in All Hallow's silver.

Of course, it would take more than the ghost of one imposing French policeman to terrify the master of magnetism. 

To his credit, the policeman did not look as if he was trying to frighten Michael, or anyone; he merely stood there, ramrod-straight, arms folded across his chest like Napoleon, long cane tucked under the crook of his elbow.

Michael said, calmly, "Monsieur l'Inspecteur. What brings you abroad this night?"

The fearsome figure shrugged. "I patrolled these streets every night for a quarter of a century. It was one of the few pleasures I had in life. The shape of the city, the stones that formed its backbone, the river that was its blood: I wrote them all on my body with each step I took."

His eyes flashed under the brim of his hat. "Now I am dead, this pleasure is only available to me on the one night of the year when the dead walk. Tomorrow the living will weep, and remember their beloved dead." 

He inclined his head gravely toward the grand sweep of the Île de la Cité, poised between the Palais and the Cathédrale Notre-Dame. "And so, tonight, I patrol the city in death, and mark the changes brought by Haussmann and the great wars, and remember what it is I used to live for when I was alive."

Not for the first time was Michael grateful for the psychic crash course in linguistics which Charles had shared with him, in the days when Charles shared his mind and his bed. He thrust aside the traitorous thought that all the good things in his life could be attributed to Charles.

"You seem tied to this place, Monsieur," the dead Inspector said, thoughtfully. Michael saw a flash of teeth, and realised the man was trying to smile in a friendly way. It wasn't working.

Michael swallowed. "As do you," he said. 

"Indeed," the Inspector said. "It was more than a century ago that I decided to seek an ending from this place, in the waters of the Seine."

Michael looked into the ghostly eyes, and could see the image of a bridge, of the waterlogged cobblestones of an ancient quay, of facing both the Palais de Justice and the Notre-Dame and being caught between. A cloudy, starless sky above, the turbulent river directly below. Then swallowing the water down, breathing it in, and dying.

"Why did you do that?" he asked, realising he was asking out of genuine curiosity. Not as the mutant terrorist, nor as the reluctant headmaster, but as the man.

Those burning eyes were filled with everything Michael had thought would live on the other side. "My world had been brought down by the actions of one man, and I felt I could not live in it any longer."

"I know the feeling," Michael said, before he could stop himself. He was not accustomed to speaking of personal matters to anyone, let alone a stranger; certainly the master of magnetism had good reason not to do so. Then again, who could be more trusted or discreet than someone long dead?

The Inspector was silent, rolling his tongue around in his mouth as he tasted Michael's uncharacteristic openness. "Tell me your story," he said, at last. 

Michael looked away. "It’s complicated," he said slowly.

"Perhaps you might find it easier if we were to walk together. That is the way it was with me," the Inspector said, and stepped off the parapet. 

Michael fell into step beside him. The Inspector's stride was long, and his cane arm swung as he walked. He must have been a formidable man in life, before whom criminals shrank into the shadows; in death, the other ghosts clearly kept a respectful distance. 

Slowly, they retraced Michael's steps towards the Jardin de l'Infante under starlight.

The Inspector said, thoughtfully, "I had pursued this man for years. He and I were young together — he a convict, I a man who guarded convicts. He broke his parole, and I pursued him, and we grew old together, him fleeing from me and I hunting him down. I felt he could never change or make anything good of his life — he had once been a thief, and a thief he would forever be." 

The spectre shrugged his shoulders again. "He proved me wrong. He rescued children, he built the industry of an entire town. He had my life in his hands — he had me at his mercy, I, this policeman who had persecuted him for so long — and then he let me go."

After a while, Michael said, slowly, "The man I refer to — he was my oldest friend, and my bitterest enemy. We were young together, we shared a dream of making the world a safe place for our kind. Then I saw how the world treated our people. I thought that men would always fear that which they did not understand, that they would never change. That our kind needed to be protected, with violence if necessary.”

He felt the Inspector’s judgmental gaze upon him, and found he could not meet those ghostly eyes. He continued, with some difficulty, “Charles didn’t agree. He rescued those who would persecute our kind, and when I defended myself against the persecutors he did not hesitate to strike me down. And so, we who had fought at each other’s sides, who shared a dream, we became enemies."

They reached the gardens. Michael waved open the gate again, and the Inspector's ghost did not bat an eye.

"What changed?" the spectre asked, in a tone more suited to interrogation than conversation. Michael found he did not mind; he knew how it felt to be the most awkward conversationalist in the room.

"I changed." Michael cast himself onto a wooden bench, facing an equestrian statue of Velasquez. "I fought my friend, my enemy, and the children of our kind whom he had gathered in his school, to whom he sought to teach his ways. I harmed one of his students, to my great regret. And then I spent time with those who were not of our people. One of their women nursed me back to health. She taught me that not all of their people were violent, that some were full of love — and that most of them could learn to live with us in peace."

The Inspector said, slowly, "I see. I, too, used to believe that people could not change, and I was eventually surprised to be proven wrong. Particularly when one of those persons was myself... So, Monsieur, what happened after that?"

"I was persuaded to acknowledge my crimes. I allowed myself to be taken into custody by a special tribunal, and I was brought to trial in Paris. Charles defended me. The proceedings were interrupted by a battle, and the Court eventually declared a mistrial. Charles was mortally wounded in the battle. He left me his school and made me promise to take care of his students, because he could not continue as its headmaster." 

There was a long silence after this. Then the Inspector seated himself on the bench beside Michael, and said, with deceptive mildness, "Your friend clearly held you in the highest esteem, if he entrusted you with his school and his students."

"I feel he ought not to have." Michael felt the same way as he had felt that evening, on his knees in the garden, his arms empty.

The Inspector drummed his ghostly fingers soundlessly on the arm of the bench. "Despite what you say, it does sound as if he had some reason to trust you. Do you esteem him, I wonder?"

Michael said, miserably, "He was my friend as well as my enemy, we shared a dream. Then the dream changed, and so did I, and I felt as if he couldn't understand."

The Inspector persisted. "And still he trusted you with the most precious thing he had — his dream."

"Yes, he did that.” Michael breathed deeply. “He trusted me with his students, with his dream, God help him, and I finally said yes to him, after all these years. And I am afraid I may have done that because he was dying, and because I loved him, not because I felt I could do his job.”

The Inspector was silent again, and Michael put his head in his hands. 

The slight, comforting pressure on his shoulder made him look up. Michael was unused to ghosts who had the strength of personality to manifest corporeally; he noted again that while the Inspector had been alive, he must have been a sheer force of nature. 

"Where is the man now? The way you speak of him, it sounds as if he did not succumb to his wounds."

In life, the Inspector had also clearly been extremely good at his job. Michael said, "He left on a journey, and hasn’t returned. We said our farewells in this garden, but in truth our hearts were too full for a proper goodbye."

The Inspector leaned forward and fixed him with a piercing look. "I could not bring myself to say farewell to my friend and my enemy. I turned my back on him and the world, and I fell."

There was a world of regret in the Inspector's dark eyes. Michael felt the man's grief as a physical blow.

Somewhere across the island, a bell tolled. Perhaps it was the stately bell of the Notre-Dame, ringing midnight across Paris over the faithful and non-faithful alike.

The Inspector noted, "The stroke of midnight, and All Hallow's becomes All Soul's, and I must leave you. There are none left alive who might remember me, Mr. Headmaster, save in songs and stories. And the stories they tell are of how I might have loved my enemy despite all those years of pursuit, and how, had I told him the truth, he might have come to love me in his turn." 

"Who are you?" Michael asked; he was afraid he knew the answer. He was aware of the songs and the different versions of the story, after all: there were many, and they all invariably led to the bridge or the quay, and the river, and a turning away from mercy and love and from life itself.

The tall figure smiled his rictus of a smile. He rose, touched a finger to his hat in farewell, and vanished silently into the fog.

 

***

 

Michael reclined — Erik reclined — on the wooden bench in the Jardin de l'Infante like a vagrant. Around him the autumn fog descended and the dew of the grasses rose. He reached out to the astral plane, as Charles had taught him. He raged, he begged, he wept — all things he had done in this garden those months ago, and they had made no difference, because Charles had still left him alone and sentenced him to this imprisonment for life.

He did those things now, anyway, until his mental voice was hoarse and his thoughts felt like splintered glass and his eyes ached. It was futile. He was spending himself into the void, in the same way a prisoner on death row cried out in vain for a commutation of his sentence. It was too late; when they had surfaced in the garden, it had already been too late. 

Eventually, he closed his eyes. 

Perhaps he was dreaming when he saw the figure outlined against the stars.

Charles Xavier, alive and well, backlit by the stars of a galaxy beyond their own. Instead of the Shi'ar ceremonial dress that he no doubt wore on a daily basis as exiled Lilandra's consort, his dream-self or astral projection was wearing a bespoke Burberry suit that matched his eyes.

Charles said, wryly, "Nice of you to remember me on All Soul's Day, old friend, but I'm not dead."

Erik felt a moment of keen relief, as sharp as a knife between the ribs. There was wetness on his face: fog, or early morning dew, and something else besides.

He reached out, and Charles grasped his hand in the powerful clasp that had always given him pleasure. 

"Come back, Charles. I can't do this any longer."

He felt Charles’ mind rub lightly across his forehead, not dipping in: just gentle, comforting pressure, like the back of a cool, dry hand against a fevered brow. "What's happened?"

Erik wanted to tell him about the children, the violence that had been done to them by the one from Beyond, the savaging of the Morlocks in the tunnels. How he had taken Sebastian Shaw's place in the Hellfire Club, how he had become the White King, how he was afraid he had finally become Shaw after all.

"I'm failing,” was what he told his oldest friend. “It's not enough. I'm not enough. It was your dream, and I was never going to be enough for it."

Charles stroked his face, with his fingers and his mind. " _Our_ dream — once, and still, and always."

Erik looked into that familiar blue gaze, remembered the grief he’d seen in the dead eyes of the Inspector who had long passed from the world. Remembered what the spectre had said to him, and what he’d confessed in his turn.

"Maybe I only told you I shared your dream because I thought I was losing you. I need you, Charles. It's always been you, it's always been us. I was a fool to not have told you before."

His friend stopped, eyes widening with an emotion that Erik couldn’t read. Then, "Well, it took you long enough,” Charles drawled. “Now that's something worth coming back from the dead to hear."

"You said you weren't dead!"

"No. Still out here, among the stars.” Charles closed the distance between them so they were standing toe to toe like adversaries, chest to chest like lovers. “I'll find a way back to you. I’m sorry it's been so difficult, and that I've left you alone for so long. I need you too."

"Quickly,” Erik said, need making him acerbic. “I can't do this without you."

"You can. I believe in the dream, our dream. I believe in you." He said Erik's name, and opened his arms, and they came together for the first time in more than twenty years. 

Erik took a moment to note that, in their thoughts, at least, they could be as easily roused for each other as they had once been, before the beach and the garden, when they had been young, and in love, and believed they could build a shining kingdom together.

 _We still can, old friend,_ Charles sent, and kissed his white hair, his scarred breast, the lines the years had left on his face. _We always could._

 

***

 

Erik woke, shivering. The last of the stars clung to the sky. Across the horizon, a sliver of dawn was breaking over Paris.

His lips were warm from sharing Charles' breath; his arms bore the imprint of Charles' body. Not a dream, after all. 

Erik rubbed his hand over his face, remembering love. Magneto felt the earth revolve and the sun begin to rise, and the metal of the gate that opened for him. 

_I gave you my word, Charles. Come what may, I will be true to it._

Michael Xavier got to his feet, shouldered his burdens once more, and began to walk along the Seine.

 

***

 

Inspector Javert walked along the Seine, across the old Quai de Gesvres, and frowned at the new bypass that had been built underneath it. 

He paced past the Hôtel de Ville and remarked upon its refurbishment, and then the new Archives buildings where the nation's important historical papers were stored. He spared a single glance for the place on the corner of the Place du Châtelet where the station-house had once stood, where he had written his letter to M. Gisquet and decided to hand in his resignation to God. 

At this hour, the old Marais district was mostly quiet. The honest citizens walking quickly along its tree-lined avenues in pairs or solitarily felt an unaccountable chill as the Inspector strode past. He leaned against the wall of the blind archway where Rue de l'Homme-Armé had been located, and paused for a moment before the existing doorway of No. 6 Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Walking on apace, he bent to drop a coin in the cup of a vagrant woman sleeping on the corner of the Square du Bataclan; she would wake in the morning to an ancient napoleon that, were she to pawn it, might provide her with shelter for a week.

The Inspector followed the new Rue Oberkampf and then the Rue du Chemin-Vert, until he reached the quiet green hillside where the Père-Lachaise cemetery spread its venerable limbs and its eternal bones.

On this night, All Hallow’s Eve or La Veille de la Toussaint, Parisians had given the cemetery a wide berth, but the paths and graves of Père-Lachaise were unquiet in any case. The famous lovers, M. Abélard and the Abbesse d'Argenteuil, were visiting their new accommodations, the English writers and American musicians from later centuries were holding court above their headstones, and that grand city of sepulchres was filled with young and old lined alike in silver: speaking, laughing, weeping, as they had once done in life.

The Pontmercy tomb was situated the elegant quarter of that sprawling city. The name had not yet fallen into disuse: Cosette's destiny had been blessed both by her own resilience and the sacrifices made for her sake, and her line and the Baron's had been a long one and happier than most. 

The Inspector crossed around the ornate crypts to a deserted corner of the hill, beside an old wall, beneath a great yew tree over which climbed wild convolvulus, amid dandelions and mosses. There was a stone marked only by the leprosy of time and lichen, amid high grasses that would soak through modern shoes and chill mortal feet to the bone. It was a fortunate thing that the Inspector was no longer susceptible to such matters. 

Leaning upon the stone was the man he had come here to find — the man who had been his enemy for so many years, and his friend for even more. 

Limned in silver, flickering around the edges like a candle burning at both ends, Jean Valjean's ghostly figure was as hale and strong as it had been in the prime of his life. Broad shoulders stretched the fabric of the National Guard uniform that he had affected this evening. The former convict was not given to laughter or levity, but he did have a line in wry irony that Javert had learned to grudgingly appreciate, and later to treasure.

Valjean got to his feet at Javert's approach. His eyes were bright under the shock of white hair. Those eyes had seen everything, of course. Perception in their unlife was different from the linear line-of-sight that they had been confined to when alive, and Valjean's eyes would always search out the Inspector, wherever he might walk on earth this night. 

Smiling gently, he held out one gloved hand to Javert. 

"I see you have taken up misleading the living for Toussaint," he remarked, by way of greeting.

Javert's own lips twitched. He took Valjean's hand in his. The familiar grip felt different from the time when they had living blood in their veins. Different, but just as pleasurable; when he was alive there had been few pleasures as dear to him as the embrace of Jean Valjean. 

"Nonsense," he said. "I learned from you that withholding information is not the same as outright untruth."

Valjean said, mildly, "I'd say omitting to tell that poor man that you didn't die after you jumped into the Seine was quite a misrepresentation of actual events."

Javert sniffed, his breath failing to frost the autumn air. "And how would that have been of help to him with his friend? You should have seen that poor headmaster, Jean, how gutted he was by his doubts and denials. I had to say something that would make him take heart, as well as take action."

Valjean eyed him knowingly and waited, and then after a while Javert added, “He sought redemption, but the path of redemption was going to be impossible for him without his friend by his side. I know a little of how that feels. I, for one, would not have been able to walk that path without you.”

Valjean now put his free hand on Javert's chest, over his quiet heart. The Inspector's skin had worn no brand there in life, but he might well have worn Valjean's, for all that this man had meant to him.

"Might not a story of how you had learned to live with your enemy, how we built a life together, been equally inspiring? We built a school, even, the same as they, although I could never persuade you to teach in it until after I was gone."

With some difficulty, Javert remembered those empty years. The days of Toussaint when he'd stood silently in this place with Valjean's daughter and son-in-law; the nights when he'd rested his head against the stone in the same way as he had laid it against Valjean's chest, as if he could still hear that beating heart. It had been the school that had sustained him, and the grandchildren he and Valjean had enjoyed, and the thought that his old friend would be waiting for him on the other side.

They'd had to replace the stone when they'd buried him, and one of the little ones had had it inscribed after all, despite Valjean’s dying wish for gentle obscurity.

_They sleep, together. Their fates were intertwined in life, they loved more strongly than they hated, and they died simply, as the night comes when day is gone._

He considered Valjean's words now. "I had thought the headmaster more easily persuaded by the thought of a missed way and then a lifetime of regret. But possibly, as you say, even more persuasive might have been an account of a lifetime of love."

"And we have had that," Valjean said. His lips curved in a small smile that was, to Javert, the sun and stars and everything in between.

Javert reached up and clasped the other hand of his oldest friend. "You ninny. We have that still, with God's grace."

Valjean could have pointed out that what they shared now was not life, although it was indeed love, and even sweeter in this existence beyond their human lives. Instead, he smiled his faint, wry smile. They sat shoulder to shoulder on the hill, as they would have sat on the wide surface of the Pont au Change, and watched the stars fade and the sun rise over the river.

Javert considered the headmaster and his friend, the countless miles that separated them, and the gulf of enmity and emotion that conspired to keep them apart. He hoped that for a moment, in this city and at this special time, when the barriers were thinnest between life and afterlife, between blindness and love, they had managed to come together after all.

The dawn was breaking, illuminating the heaven's-eye view between the Cathédrale Notre-Dame and the Palais. Javert knew which had prevailed in the end. He clasped Valjean's ghostly fingers in his own and gave thanks, as he always did — for mercy, for more time, and for the trials of love.

**Author's Note:**

>  **The Trial of Magneto** (Uncanny X-Men #200), famously set in Paris, was published in Jan 1986. In this comics/OTM mashed-up timeline, I took as my reference the [Timeline Original Timeline Movies](http://xmenmovies.wikia.com/wiki/)'s 1986 meeting with a young Jean Grey, and relocated this issue and story to the mid/late 90s pre-X1, Kitty's 1980s pantsuit and string tie notwithstanding. (This mash-up further postulates Charles and Erik meet cute in Miami, spend time with Gabrielle and battle Baron von Strucker/HYDRA in Haifa, go on their XFC road trip, and eventually break up on a beach in Cuba.) As a matter of international jurisprudence, the UN Security Council/ICJ's ad hoc jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanity was superseded by the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the permanent International Criminal Court at the Hague in 2002, so 1998 would be [our long-stop date](https://www.icc-cpi.int/about) for the story.
> 
> In X#200, from which much of the flashback dialogue is shamelessly derived, after the climatic battle in the cellars of the Palais de Justice, the villains Fenris blast down one of the cellar walls; Charles is swept into the Seine and Erik goes after him. They surface in an unnamed garden, and [amid its statues and sculptured topography they weep and make whispered promises in each other's arms](http://xmen-comics-geek.blogspot.sg/2015/04/the-uncanny-x-men-issue-200-trial-of.html). E kindly helped me take up the cudgels of locating said gardens! 
> 
> The cellars of the Palais form part of the tunnels of the [Conciergerie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conciergerie), the infamous old prison which had housed Marie Antoinette and, post-Bourbon-restoration, high-value prisoners, most notably the future Napoleon III. Although it was decommissioned as a prison in 1914, Erik is nevertheless depicted on the first panel of X#200 [in his not-very-sexy new purple uniform](http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/uncanny_x-men_200.shtml) as being led through its tunnels on the way to his trial.
> 
> As such, assuming Charles/Erik had been swept into the river from the Conciergerie and allowing for the downstream directional current of the Seine, they would have surfaced on the Right Bank at the **Jardin de l'Infante** , [ the nearest garden with statuary on the Rive Droit](http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=48.85956&mlon=2.33768#map=19/48.85916/2.33712), between Pont Royal and Pont Louis XIV.
> 
> This was [ a set of private gardens attached to the Louvre (at 14)](http://www.riha-journal.org/articles/2014/2014-oct-dec/lorente-monuments). Created in 1722 for the Spanish Infanta María Ana Victoria, this garden was surrounded by golden fences, as painted [by Monet in 1867](http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/Monet_Garden.htm), and had [lovely statues (one of which is that of Velasquez)](http://www.riha-journal.org/articles/2014/galleries-2014/images-lorente-riha-journal-0099/fig.-3). The garden isn't [ always open to the public](http://www.expointhecity.com/2016/06/02/rendez-vous-aux-jardins-a-paris/), but that's not going to stop our Master of Magnetism.
> 
> During Valvert’s day, in the 1830s/40s, these gardens would certainly have been private, but Javert would be familiar with them as per [this 1827 map of Paris parks](http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/thematic-maps/landmark-thematic-atlases/maire-atlas-paris-parks.jpg). 
> 
> In the 1980s/1990s, the parapet [from which Javert jumps into the Seine](https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/thumbnail/136000/136630/painting_page_800x/Corot/View-Of-The-Pont-Au-Change-From-Quai-De-Gesvres,-Summer-1830.jpg?ts=1459229076) in Les Miserables Vol V Book 4 Chapter 1, the Quai de Gesvres, [ no longer borders directly on the Seine](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Paris_quai_de_gesvres_2.JPG/520px-Paris_quai_de_gesvres_2.JPG); in the 1960s they built a bypass, the [Voie Georges Pompidou](http://media.gettyimages.com/videos/view-of-traffic-on-street-at-seine-and-voie-georges-pompidou-paris-video-id162813784?s=640x640) which now runs beneath the Quai towards the Jardin de l’infante and the Tuileries Gardens. [No wonder the musical fandom suggests he makes his leap from this bridge instead](http://france.jeditoo.com/IleDeFrance/Paris/1er/picts/Conciergerie%20Palais%20justice%20marche%20aux%20fleurs/pont-au-change-conciergerie-la-nuit.jpg).
> 
> Valjean's unmarked headstone bears this inscription in pencil in LM Vol V Book 9 Ch 6:  
>  _Il dort. Quoique le sort fût pour lui bien étrange, il vivait. Il mourut quand il n’eut plus son ange. La chose simplement d’elle-même arriva, comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s’en va._


End file.
